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Johnnie St. Vrain: A straight answer on Longmont's diagonal houses

Posted:
10/16/2017 12:08:02 PM MDT

Updated:
10/16/2017 12:09:22 PM MDT

James Sherman is the grandson of the L.J. Carlson, who owned the land that was developed by Ivan Forbes. Does Sherman know why the homes in that neighborhood are built at an angle to the street? "No." (Johnnie St. Vrain / Longmont Times-Call)

Editor's note: This Johnnie St. Vrain column appeared first November of 2014.

Hello Johnnie: I am wondering if you could shed some light on something I have wondered about for years.

Why is it that some of the older neighborhoods in town have the houses set "angled" on the property — not parallel with the street it sits on? Is there a reason or was this done just to make these neighborhoods look different? — Wondering Wanderer

Wondering Wanderer: Others have wondered the same thing, with one reader asking this same question a couple of years back.

Because these houses sit relatively close to one another, my first thought was that by situating the houses like this, the builder made it so that no resident would be looking directly into his next-door neighbor's windows.

When Johnnie's first answer about this ran, several readers responded, saying that the late Ivan Forbes developed the area. One said that Forbes "did remark about a little privacy, but additionally he wanted something a little different in the area." Another said that Forbes "had his own imaginative ideas about development." A third said it had something to do with south-facing windows.

I also went to the Boulder County assessor's website to get an overview of the part of town with diagonally situated homes, bordered roughly by Tulip Street on the west, Bross Street on the east, and Mountain View and 11th avenues on the north and south. Looking at the aerial view, I realized something that had not come to mind from street level. Those lots are parallelograms, and as such are larger than they would be if they were rectangular. Within the same depth, the developer got more area out of each lot, with a squared-off lot at each end of the block.

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The house on the squared-off lot at the northeast corner of Gay Street and 11th is unlike the other homes in that neighborhood. This house faces due south and was built in the 1920s, not in the early 1950s, when other homes on that part of Gay Street were built.

Figuring that this was the home in which the original landowner lived, I drove over on Tuesday. It so happens that two men were standing out front. One of them, James Sherman, owns that home. The other is his brother, Kenneth, who was visiting.

James Sherman told me that in 1964, he bought the house from the estate of his grandad, L.J. Carlson, who had homesteaded that land and had sold it to Forbes. James told me that when he was younger, he hunted on that land. It was marshy back then, he said.

James and Kenneth told me that they are the great-great grandsons of Jerome Gould, who arrived in the area in the mid-1800s.

Do the Sherman brothers, who have lived here all their lives and have roots deeper than the trees', know why the homes in that area face diagonally?

"No," James said.

So, Wondering, I'll have to leave you with the words of city of Longmont planner Ben Ortiz, who replied to me when I first answered this question two years ago.

"I think the most basic answer is that the developer wanted to build them that way," Ortiz said. "... Unfortunately, this is one question we may never know the answer to."

Ivan Forbes looks over what would become the Stroh Heights Second Addition subdivision in north Longmont in this May 1966 photo. During the 1950s, '60s and '70s, Forbes built more than 1,000 homes in several Longmont subdivisions. He developed the Francis Street Center as well. Forbes and his wife lived in the 1100 block of Sumner, in one of the diagonally situated homes. (Times-Call file)

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